Control of Departure and Approach Maneuvers of Tiltwing VTOL Aircraft

摘要

This paper presents a flight path control system for fully automated departure and approach maneuvers for unmanned tiltwing aircraft. While different approaches to flight state control for tiltwing aircraft can be found in literature and have shown their applicability in flight test, tiltwing flight path control still constitutes a challenging problem. Tiltwing flight path control involves guiding the aircraft during hover and cruise flight as well as during transition between these flight states. All this is essential to make full use of the tiltwing's outstanding flight performance characteristics within fully automated operation. The control system presented is able to perform approach and departure maneuvers including flight state transitions within challenging environments such as encountered in populated urban areas. During the maneuvers the aircraft follows a predefined straight-lined flight path independent of the wind situation. The control system was implemented for a demonstrator aircraft. Due to its very good flight test results, the control system was used within a parcel delivery trial operation for a three-month period and was able to prove applicability.